A new report, first reported by SearchEngineLand.com, shows the percentage of local searches on Google are continuing to rise, up to 43%. That means nearly half of all searches performed on Google are local in nature — consumers searching for businesses, locations or services near them. Google also recently announced that 50% of mobile searches are local. If you serve a local audience, these numbers reinforce what you already knew: customers are finding local business through Search, and many of them are searching through a smartphone or other mobile device.

If you haven’t already, check your local listing in Google. When you type in your business name, does your Google Plus Local result appear? Have you claimed your listing, and is your name, address, phone number and website correct? Are there any old locations or business names showing up?

If you see old, outdated or inconsistent information in your business listings, it’s time for some clean-up. Don’t stop with Google. Check Bing and Yahoo Local as well as directories like Yelp and CitySearch. Correct and consistent information, along with a steady stream of reviews, is the secret to ranking locally.

Google Places, the home for business listings within Google, has now moved to Google+ Local. What does this mean for Small Business Owners? There are several things you should be aware of. First, you will continue to manage your business listing through the Google Places dashboard. In fact, most of the changes Google recently introduced are user-facing, meaning that people who view your listing and leave a review for you will have a different experience than they did with Google Places, but for the Business Owner the changes are relatively minor.

One important thing you should do immediately is create a Google+ profile using the same email address as your Google Places dashboard login. That will make it easier for Google to complete the migration of your business listing from Places to Google+ Local. If you already have a Google+ profile, but haven’t logged in recently, do so now and tell Google which reviews and photos you’d like to make public.

You should also log in to your Google Places dashboard and click the “See your listing on Google Maps” link and verify that it links to your new Google+ Local page.

If you have already created a Google+ Business page (this is separate from your Google+ Local listing), stay tuned because Google will be merging those pages together. If you’d like to be alerted when this happens, use this form and submit your email address.

Lastly, be aware that customers will need to have a Google+ account in order to leave a review for you. If they already have a Gmail account, it’s an easy process to create a Google+ profile. Also note that Google’s 5-star rating guide has been replaced with a Zagat scoring guide. Users rate your business on a 3 point scale, and your overall score is displayed using a 30 point scale. Scoring summaries are displayed next to the business. Learn more at the Google+ Local page.

Although Google’s latest algorithm update — named “Penguin” — allegedly affected just 3.1% of Search queries, many business and website owners are speaking up over this major change in how search results are displayed. Some have seen traffic disappear overnight, while others have benefited from the update.

Penguin rolled out April 24th (as did several other updates that month) so if your website traffic suddenly dropped around that time, you may have been impacted by the new algorithm. While no one knows for sure what factors Google considered when adjusting rankings for Penguin, it seems clear they have penalized website owners who have purchased backlinks, or “over-optimized” their website with keyword-stuffing or other ill-advised tactics.

There have been several articles written on how to avoid Penguin-like penalties, and I’ve recapped and expanded on the best of those recommendations here.

That’s right — an Adwords ad. I hear from Small Business owners all the time “well, we tried Adwords ads but they didn’t work for us”. Sound familiar? If it does, you probably used one of Google’s free $75 advertising coupons, wrote 4 or 5 ads and called it a day. Maybe you got a few clicks, and maybe a phone call but nothing ever came of it. Conclusion? Adwords isn’t for us.

Before you write off Adwords completely, ask yourself a few questions. Did you create at least 5 different ad groups for your campaign, each with a tightly crafted keyword phrase? Did all your ads contain the target keyword? Did you use negative keywords to weed out unwanted clicks? Did you write at least 10 ads per ad group and pause the underperformering ads? What landing page are you sending clicks to?

Adwords is not a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. Done correctly, you need to monitor and optimize your campaign daily — more often if it’s a new campaign. You may find only 3 or 4 ads out of 50 that effectively drive clicks and conversions, and unless your Adwords campaign is properly optimized you’ll never find those best performers.

Before you launch an Adwords campaign, make sure you do at least the following:

1) Create 5 separate Ad Groups. Ad groups make up an Adwords campaign, and each Ad Group should be centered around a specific keyword phrase. Every ad in that Ad Group should contain your keyword phrase, and the content on the landing page for those ads should be closely related to the phrase. If the chain of Ad Group, ads and landing page don’t all center around a focused keyword phrase, your Quality Score will suffer, and you’ll pay more per click than you need to.

2) Create 10 ads per Ad Group. Try different headlines, different calls to action, with and without a phone number, with and without your business name. The possibilities are endless — experiment and check out your competitors’ ads by doing a Google search on your target keywords and taking note of the paid ads on the page. You may get some good ideas for your own ads.

3) Use ad extensions in your ads. Click on the Ad Extensions tab in your Adwords interface to set up ad extensions. You’ve probably seen ad extensions before, but didn’t know what they were called. The 2 ads below illustrate 2 different types of ad extensions. The first is a sitelink extension where the ad displays additional links to your site, handy if you want to highlight important pages like “Contact Us” or “Specials”. The 2nd ad demonstrates the Location extension where prospective clients will see your address and phone number right in the ad with a link to directions. Other available ad extensions include call extensions, product extensions and social extensions. Learn more about ad extensions from Google.

4) Use negative keywords. Your ad may be showing for search queries that result in unwanted clicks. For example, if you’re advertising Medical Transcription services but don’t want job-seeking medical transcriptionists to click your ad, you could filter our those queries through the use of negative keywords. Using negative keywords tells Google “don’t display my ads when these words are searched on”. In our Medical Transcription example, using negative keywords like “salary”, “application”, “career”, “degree” and “employment” would suppress your ad for searches related to Medical Transcriptionist employment and avoid unwanted clicks.

5) Use a landing page other than your home page. The most common mistake in Adwords is sending all your ads to the home page. Not only does this provide a poor user experience — after all, if you clicked on an ad about home heating specials, wouldn’t you expect to be brought to a page describing those specials? — but linking to a loosely related page can hurt your Quality Score and increase your cost per click.

The best solution is to create a custom landing page or pages for your ads that uses a similar headline and language as your ad, and makes it easy to request more information, take advantage of a special or get in touch. The landing page below links directly from an ad about free tax forms. Makes sense doesn’t it? The headline makes it clear I can get a free tax form, and handy fields are provided to request one.

If you can’t afford to create custom landing pages, at least select a page from your site that ties closely to your ad, and considering tweaking the copy on the page so it’s closely related to the headline of the ads you’re running for that page.

Follow these 5 tips and you’ll stand a much better chance of creating a successful Adwords campaign. Also, run your Adwords campaign several weeks before judging results. Optimizing ads properly takes time and patience. When in doubt, create more ads to test — finding the best combination of ads, keywords and landing pages is a numbers game. Play to win.

But just how important are local reviews? What can you do to prevent negative reviews? How many customers go online to research a product or service? How many reviews do businesses in the #1 position of Google Places have on average?

Find out these answers and more in the Infographic we’ve just released on reviews and their impact on customers and Local SEO. Enjoy!

Add this Infographic to your website: Simply copy the code below (graphic has been sized to a width of 550) and paste it into the HTML of your blog, website, or Static FBML box on Facebook.

<a href="http://540seo.com/are-online-reviews-killing-your-business" target="_blank"><img src="http://540seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/are-online-reviews-killing-your-business-infographic.jpg" width="550" height="1876"/></a><br/>[540SEO::SEO experts and <a href="http://540SEO.com"><i>local search optimization</i></a> specialists]<br/><strong><a href="http://540seo.com/are-online-reviews-killing-your-business">Add this graphic to your site</a></strong>.

<a href="http://540seo.com/are-online-reviews-killing-your-business" target="_blank"><img src="http://540seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/are-online-reviews-killing-your-business-infographic.jpg" width="550" height="1876"/></a><br/>[540SEO::SEO experts and <a href="http://540SEO.com"><i>local search optimization</i></a> specialists]<br/><strong><a href="http://540seo.com/are-online-reviews-killing-your-business">Add this graphic to your site</a></strong>.

Interview with SEO Expert Keith Fleming

Keith Fleming, president of 540 SEO, draws upon years of SEO experience to offer his anwers to these frequently asked questions.

A lot of people believe SEO is unnecessary or doesn’t work; do you have any examples or success stories that SEO does work?

There’s no question: SEO does work if used properly, but you must have the site’s fundamentals in place first. A site with thin or duplicate content will have huge problems ranking, regardless of how well the site is optimized.

Now more than ever, it’s important to look at sites holistically when doing SEO – it’s not just page titles, but it’s also content, site navigation – the whole user experience.

I can think of numerous successful SEO stories, but my favorite is the Crossfit gym I attend here in Portland, OR. It was a new gym at the time, and I offered to help improve their rankings and site traffic by doing some basic SEO. Their local listing was buried on page 6 of Google Places, and the organic listing was at page 10 or worse.

By following the basics: careful keyword research, on-page optimization, optimizing the Google Places page, working with them to get more reviews and ratings – I now have them at #1 in the local listings and the top 5 for competitive national terms.

What’s been really fun is watching the clientele at the gym grow. I’ll ask some of the new people how they found it, and I love hearing “Oh, I just did a search on Google and found them that way.” It’s powerful stuff!

If you were implementing an SEO strategy on a website, what indicators would you look to improve?

It depends on the type of business, but traffic, SERP’s and conversion rates are usually at the top of my list for metrics to improve. Understanding the search engine picture and how the business stacks up against the competition is usually one of my first steps.

You hear over and over again “SEO isn’t about rankings, it’s about traffic” – well, that’s true to some extent, but without a decent SERP (by that, I mean page 1) the traffic will never follow. So it’s important to keep both metrics in mind.

If the business is using Analytics, I also spend time understanding traffic sources, and what content is drawing the most traffic. Depending on what you find there, you may uncover some secondary goals that need addressing (like a high bounce rate, or a popular content area you can leverage to drive more traffic).

I also like to look beyond the metrics at the bigger business picture. I think it’s critical as a good SEO to understand the business, its goals and its challenges. Asking questions like “Who is your typical customer,” “How do most people find you,” and “What are your biggest challenges right now?” gives me the background I need to really understand what the business is about, what they are trying to achieve, and how SEO can help them.

What are the key areas you see most webmasters miss out on when doing SEO?

Most webmasters aren’t spending enough time on keyword research in my opinion. That very basic step is the heart of SEO. It all comes down to 1) what keywords are relevant to the business, 2) what’s the volume of that keyword or phrase, and 3) how difficult it is to rank for that keyword.

Of course, if you’re doing local SEO, understanding which KW’s trigger local results, and what local KW volumes are (using Google Insights) is also critical. Sometimes it takes hours to find the right set of keywords, so you’ve got to be willing to invest the time.

The other key area I see webmasters missing out on is content. Especially in this post-Panda world, sites need to invest in creating fresh, well-written content. That’s why blogs work so well – you’ve got to produce that regular stream of new, original content that Google loves so much.

What was the Panda update and how has affected SEO?

The Panda update (also called Farmer) is a new Google algorithm that rolled out in February 2011. Iterations of Panda have been released throughout the year, first for the US, then most recently, to all English queries in the rest of the world.

You may have heard about the impact of Panda on “content farms” or sites with copied or shallow content. Once the Panda algorithm rolled out, content farms, as well as sites with copied, thin, or unoriginal content, saw immediate drops in ranking and traffic. I’ve read that 12% of sites were hit by the Panda algorithm, although others claim the rate is much higher.

So what does Panda mean for businesses and webmasters? A focus on extensive, original content that’s relevant to their niche. There has been a well-publicized list of questions Google (allegedly) used when deciding how to evaluate sites with Panda.

Here’s a sampling of those questions, and as you can see, the focus is on quality, trust and breadth of information. Keep these questions in mind when creating content for your own site, or evaluating the content of your clients’ sites:

• Would you trust the information presented here?
• Is the article written by an expert?
• Does this site have obvious errors?
• Would you expect to see this article in print?
• Does this article provide original content or information?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis?
• Would you give this site your credit card details?
• Would you trust ‘medical information’ from this site?
• Would you recognize this site as an authority?
• Would you share this site on a social site?
• Would you email this site to a peer?
• When was it last updated?

What role do you think video plays in effective search engine optimization?

What actions would you recommend to webmasters wanting to implement video on their site?

With Google’s Universal Search results showing a cross-section of Organic, Local, News, Real-time, Images, Video, etc. the name of the game is to lock up as many types of search results for a given domain as possible.

Often, it will be easier to rank highly for a Google image or video result than it will be to rank for the Organic result itself. For that reason alone, it makes a lot of sense to implement and optimize videos on your site.

Search engines are analyzing video titles and descriptions, so optimizing those fields with appropriate keywords is a must (go for readability over keyword stuffing to encourage click throughs).

Syndicating videos beyond just YouTube is also recommended as a way to increase Social sharing – another metric Google takes into account when analyzing how to rank and display video results.

Also, make sure to implement a video sitemap. One of the advantages of using a sitemap is the ability to add the video’s URL. That means that if you are using YouTube to host your video, but you’re embedding the video on your site, the sitemap will tell Google to send search result clicks to your page instead of YouTube. Sitemaps also allow you to add video transcriptions and that means you’ve got a nice block of unique content for the Search Engines to index and analyze – always a good SEO strategy.

What processes would you undertake if you were looking to get a website to rank higher?

Keyword research is very high on the list of things I’d do. I will spend hours trying to find the right target phrases for a website. There are some terrific tools, like SEOMoz’s “Keyword Difficulty Tool” that will not only tell you the search volume for a keyword phrase, but also the domain and page authority of the sites that are ranking for that phrase.

Once I’ve got my keywords, carefully allocating them to each page on the site is the next critical step. Optimize only one page for each target keyword! Otherwise, you’ll have multiple pages competing for the same words.

If I’m trying to get a business to rank in Google’s local results, I’ll also spend a lot of time reviewing the business citations in city directories like Yelp, CitySearch, YellowPages.com, etc.

Google Places gathers citation information from several key directories, and if it finds conflicting data, the listing’s rank will suffer. Everything must be consistent across all the databases – down to “Street” vs. “St.,” as well as the basics like phone number and website address. It’s extremely labor-intensive but absolutely critical.

How important do you think domain age and reputation are in ranking well in the search engines and how do you increase your domain authority?

Because of multiple variables (number and strength of competitors, keywords you’re trying to rank for, etc.) it’s difficult to say how important these factors are individually. It’s my opinion that domain age enhances a site’s ability to rank, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a gating factor, as I have seen domains < 1 year old rank extremely well.

I do believe that obtaining links from authoritative, relevant sites is the best way to improve your own site’s domain authority and that’s probably why aged domains tend to have more domain authority – they’ve had more time to collect authoritative backlinks!

Do you think PageRank is outdated, and how do you improve your PageRank?

Like anything else in SEO, I don’t think it’s a good idea to focus on a single metric. PageRank for me is one measure I’ll use when evaluating a competitive site or one I want to secure a backlink from.

I’ll also review PR for client sites along with lots of other metrics like Domain and Page authority, MozRank, Alexa rank, links in Open Site Explorer and more.

I don’t think it’s useful to focus on improving PageRank, but I do think there’s value in 1) ensuring your on-page SEO is 100%, 2) continually improving and expanding your content, and 3) expanding your backlink profile with high authority and relevant links. Those activities will naturally improve your PageRank and Domain authority.

Is there any SEO strategy you have found particularly successful?

I’m a believer in the basics, so extensive keyword research, combined with good on-page SEO and link building, works very well for me.

Link building in particular leaves a lot of room for creativity, so that’s an area I expect to grow and change along with SEO. Infographics have become a popular way to naturally build backlinks, but as they’ve become more popular, it’s become much more competitive to get “pickup.”

Also, paying attention to trending topics and blogging on some aspect of them (if related to your site) can be a really effective way of capturing incremental traffic. The Web is dynamic; your site should be too.

Lastly, photo syndication through sites like Flickr remains an effective way to secure backlinks from high authority sites and build your image search traffic. Not a new tactic, but still a good one!

What are your top 10 tips for beginner SEOs?

1. Evaluate and select an SEO toolkit. SEOMoz has one of the best, but whatever you choose, learn how to use it well.
2. Set up your own websites and experiment. See what works, see what doesn’t. Try new things on your own site and extend those successful techniques to client sites.
3. Learn Local SEO. Local SEO has its own unique aspects, and learning how to optimize a business for a local audience is critical for a professional SEO. Read David Mihm’s “Local Search Ranking Factors.” Offer to work with a Small Business owner for free once you learn the basics.
4. Learn WordPress. It’s one of the most popular CMS platforms out there, and as a successful SEO, you’ll need to understand how to work with WordPress pages, posts, plug-ins and more. Learn on your own, or take a class. It’s worth it.
5. Get comfortable reading and writing HTML. You don’t have to be a programmer, but you should learn some basic HTML and feel comfortable “viewing source” on a webpage and understanding what you see.
6. Run an Adwords, Bing and Facebook ad campaign. Paid Search is just as important as non-paid. Get to know these advertising platforms (run campaigns for your own sites if you have to) because each has its own quirks.
7. Learn how to do careful keyword research. Read up on the best techniques and practice, practice, practice. Keyword research is the foundation of SEO, so get good at it!
8. Learn how to score a page. After optimizing a page with page titles, H1/H2, alt image tags, etc., use a scoring tool (like SEOMoz’s On-Page Keyword Optimization tool) to find out how well your page scores for your target term. You think you optimized the page well, but do the Search Engines agree?
9. Dive into Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Both have embarrassing riches of data. Learn what the available metrics are, what they mean, and how to use them.
10. Be a student. SEO is ever-changing, and that means keeping up with the latest news, techniques and developments. Read, participate and ask questions. Stay current. Join your local professional or networking group for Search Engine Marketing if you have one. And have fun!

Keith Fleming is president of 540 SEO, a Portland, Oregon based SEO firm serving digital agencies and small businesses nationwide.

Keith has over 20 years of experience as a technology executive and digital marketer for both Fortune 50 corporations and Silicon Valley start-ups. His expertise includes Search Engine Optimization, Local Search Optimization, Adwords campaign management and digital marketing strategies for small businesses. Contact information: Keith@540SEO.com http://540SEO.com

Ever wonder how to get rid of an incorrect Google Places listing? There are lots of opinions on how to accomplish this task, but a lack of documented guidelines from Google. Read an account of the right way to do it:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-right-way-to-delete-a-google-places-listing

Similar to Groupon, businesses create an offer and Google takes over from there — marketing your offer to the massses and driving customers to your door. Also like Groupon, you get paid upfront (it’s not clear if there payment terms like Groupon, I would assume there are).

Go to the Google Offers sign up form and you’ll be contacted with details on how to participate.

Make sure you’ve claimed and optimized your Google Places page first though — that’s the first step in participating in Google’s local search arena.

Here’s the video Google is using to introduce Offers. Nice to look at, not chock-full of information, however

Are you a Portland-area business? Have you ever run a Groupon offer? How did it go? What you think of Google’s entree into Groupon-style offers?

We’ve made a decision to shift our efforts toward other present and future product offerings for local businesses, and will be discontinuing this trial. To that end, we’ve now halted new signups and will be working with existing participating businesses over the coming weeks to help them meet their marketing needs with other Google products where possible.

I think this is an unfortunate move, because for Small Business owners who wanted a quick and easy way to highlight their Google Places listing, Tags fit the bill neatly. Boost ads, in my opinion, are just a “poor man’s” version of Adwords. If you’re going to take the time to set up a text ad, opt for the more precise targeting and keyword selection Adwords ads offer.

On the plus side of Boost ads, they trigger the eye-catching blue flag in your listing, helping it stand out in the same way Tags do. However, (pro tip here!) I’ve found that the same blue flag is triggered if you set up an Adwords ad, and add in an “ad extension” — specifically your Google Places listing.  See example on the left.

In this example, we have an Adwords ad, with the site extension selected for “location”.  I should note the blue flag doesn’t show up each time.  If you’ve got other site extensions — like sitelinks — enabled, sometimes the ad will show those instead, and not always with the blue flag.

Your best bet? Run both Boost ads, and Adwords, and determine which is bringing in a higher ROI. You’ll want to enable your site extensions on your Adwords ads first. For more on how to do that, check out this Google Help topic on setting up ad extensions.

If you’d like to try Boost ads, they’re fairly easy to set up.  See the video below.

Oh, and if you’d like  some free Adwords advertising, give 540SEO a shout. As a Google Engage Partner, we can set up Small Businesses who haven’t tried Adwords before with $100 in free advertising.  Contact us for more details.

As Local Search gets more competitive, and more and more businesses have claimed, optimized and promoted their Google Places listing, edges like Tags can make the difference in getting noticed and clicked.  And when Local results dominate the entire page of Search results,  you need all the help you can get to stand out from the pack.

You can change or deactivate tags at any point during the month, and any charges or prorated.  To get started, go to your Google Places dashboard, click the listing where you want the tag to appear, and click “create tag”.

Even better, here’s a handy video walking you through the setup steps: